social results, no attempt is made to go over the entire history, in chronological order, of America. Rather a series of types is taken up: Chicago and the northwestern Mississippi valley; Virginia, New York, and the Puritans and Pilgrims in New England. The aim is to present a variety of climatic and local conditions, to show the different sorts of obstacles and helps that people found, and a variety of historic traditions and customs and purposes of different people.
The method involves presentation of a large amount of detail, of minutiae of surroundings, tools, clothing, household utensils, foods, modes of living day by day, so that the child can reproduce the material as life, not as mere historic information. In this way, social processes and results become realities. Moreover, to the personal and dramatic identification of the child with the social life studied, characteristic of the earlier period, there now supervenes an intellectual identification—the child puts himself at the standpoint of the problems that have to be met and rediscovers, so far as may be, ways of meeting them.
The general standpoint—the adaptation of means to ends—controls also the work in science. For purposes of convenience, this may be regarded as now differentiated into two sides—the geographical and the experimental. Since, as just stated, the history work depends upon an appreciation of the natural environment as affording resources and presenting urgent problems, considerable attention is paid to the physiography, mountains, rivers, plains, and lines of natural travel and exchange, flora and fauna of each of the colonies. This is connected with field excursions in order that the child may be able to supply from observation, as far as possible, the data to be used by constructive imagination, in reproducing more remote environments.
The experimental side devotes itself to a study of processes which yield typical results of value to men. The activity of the child in the earlier period is directly productive, rather than investigative. His experiments are modes of active doing—almost as much so as his play and games. Later he tries to find out how various materials or agencies are manipulated in order to give certain results. It is thus clearly distinguished from experimentation in the scientific sense—such as is appropriate to the secondary period—where the aim is the discovery of facts and verification of principles. Since the practical interest predominates, it is a study of applied science rather than of pure science. For instance, processes are selected found to have been of importance in colonial life—bleaching, dyeing, soap and candle-making, manufacture of pewter dishes, making of cider and vinegar, leading to some study of chemical agencies, of oils, fats, elementary metallurgy. “Physics” is commenced from the same applied standpoint. A study is made of the use and transfer of energy in the spinning-wheel and looms; everyday uses of mechanical principles are taken up—in locks, scales, etc., going on later to electric appliances and devices—bells, the telegraph, etc.
The relation of means to ends is emphasized also in other lines of work. In art attention is given to practical questions of perspective, of proportion of spaces and masses, balance, effect of color combinations and contrasts, etc. In cooking, the principles of food-composition and of effects of various agencies upon these elements are taken up, so that the children may deduce, as far as possible, their own rules. In sewing, methods of cutting, fitting (as applied to dolls’ clothing) come up, and later on the technical sequence of stitches, etc.
It is clear that with the increasing differentiation of lines of work and interest, leading to greater individuality and independence in various studies, great care must be taken to find the balance between, on one side, undue separation and isolation, and, on the other, a miscellaneous and casual attention to a large number of topics, without adequate emphasis and distinctiveness to any. The first principle makes work mechanical and formal, divorces it from the life-experience of the child and from effective influence upon conduct. The second makes it scrappy and vague and leaves the child without definite command of his own powers or clear consciousness of purposes. It is perhaps only in the present year that the specific principle of the conscious relation of means to ends has emerged as the unifying principle of this period; and it is hoped that emphasis of this in all lines of work will have a decidedly cumulative and unifying effect upon the child’s development.
Nothing has been said, as yet, of one of the most important agencies or means in extending and controlling experience—command of the social or conventional symbols—symbols of language, including those of quantity. The importance of these instrumentalities is so great that the traditional or three R’s curriculum is based upon them—from 60 to 80 per cent of the time program of the first four or five years of elementary schools being devoted to them, the smaller figure representing selected rather than average schools.
These subjects are social in a double sense. They represent the tools which society has evolved in the past as the instruments of its intellectual pursuits. They represent the keys which will unlock to the child the wealth of social capital which lies beyond the possible range of his limited individual experience. While these two points of view must always give these arts a highly important place in education, they also make it necessary that certain conditions should be observed in their introduction and use. In a wholesale and direct application of the studies no account is taken of these conditions. The chief problem at present relating to the three R’s is recognition of these conditions and the adaptation of work to them.
The conditions may be reduced to two: (1) The need that the child shall have in his own personal and vital experience a varied background of contact and acquaintance with realities, social and physical. This is necessary to prevent symbols from becoming a purely second-hand and conventional substitute for reality. (2) The need that the more ordinary, direct, and personal experience of the child shall furnish problems, motives, and interests that necessitate recourse to books for their solution, satisfaction, and pursuit. Otherwise, the child approaches the book without intellectual hunger, without alertness, without a questioning attitude, and the result is the one so deplorably common: such abject dependence upon books as weakens and cripples vigor of thought and inquiry, combined with reading for mere random stimulation of fancy, emotional indulgence, and flight from the world of reality into a make-believe land.
The problem here is then (1) to furnish the child with a sufficiently large amount of personal activity in occupations, expression, conversation, construction, and experimentation, so that his individuality, moral and intellectual, shall not be swamped by a disproportionate amount of the experience of others to which books introduce him; and (2) so to conduct this more direct experience as to make the child feel the need of resort to and command of the traditional social tools—furnish him with motives and make his recourse to them intelligent, an addition to his powers, instead of a servile dependency. When this problem shall be solved, work in language, literature, and number will not be a combination of mechanical drill, formal analysis, and appeal, even if unconscious, to sensational interests; and there will not be the slightest reason to fear that books and all that relates to them will not take the important place to which they are entitled.
It is hardly necessary to say that the problem is not yet solved. The common complaints that children’s progress in these traditional school studies is sacrificed to the newer subjects that have come into the curiculum is sufficient evidence that the exact balance is not yet struck. The experience thus far in the school, even if not demonstrative, indicates the following probable results: (1) the more direct modes of activity, constructive and occupation work, scientific observation, experimentation, etc., present plenty of opportunities and occasions for the necessary use of reading, writing (and spelling), and number work. These things may be introduced, then, not as isolated studies, but as organic outgrowths of the child’s experience. The problem is, in a systematic and progressive way, to take advantage of these occasions. (2) The additional vitality and meaning which these studies thus secure make possible a very considerable reduction of the time ordinarily devoted to them. (3) The final use of the symbols, whether in reading, calculation, or composition, is more intelligent, less mechanical; more active, less passively receptive; more an increase of power, less a mere mode of enjoyment.
On the other hand, increasing experience seems to make clear the following points: (1) that it is possible, in
